What was the first spaghetti western movie?
The term “spaghetti western” may be somewhat dated, but many of the films it refers to have aged like fine wine. Western movies with Italian directors and/or producers proliferated through the 1960s and have since become cult classics thanks to their stylised sequences, epic cycles of heroic symbolism, and iconic musical scores by the likes of Ennio Morricone.
Spaghetti western typically differ from their American, British and German counterparts in their more sympathetic and even-handed treatment of Native American and Mexican characters. And they tend to apply a more nuanced approach to good and evil, with heroes and anti-heroes often hard to define.
Spanish western actor Aldo Sambrell has claimed that journalist Alfonso Sánchez came up with the phrase “spaghetti western” when Spanish-language western movies made in Andalusia began to involve Italian investment, production and direction. These films were also typically characterised by their extremely low budgets, tight production schedules, and use of cheap locations in Europe. The Tabernas Desert in Almería, Spain, was the most common locale for the sets of Spanish-Italian westerns.
Under the stewardship of directors such as Sergio Leone and Sergio Corbucci, the movies transformed the western genre and influenced other genres of filmmaking, too. Quentin Tarantino is just one of many cinematic artists to have named spaghetti westerns among his favourite films and biggest influences.
So, who started the craze?
Long before Leone’s landmark duel sequences, Corbucci’s graphic displays of violence or Morricone’s inimitable scores, however, Italians were already movies about the Wild West. These movies were mostly parodies of early American westerns, the first of which was the 1943 Italian-language comedy Il fanciullo del West (“The Boy in the West”).
The 1963 film joint Spanish-Italian production Duello nel Texas, known in English as Gunfight in the Red Sands, was the first Italian-made film since the western-parody fad had begun to play the genre straight, without comedy. This movie paved the way for the first spaghetti western labelled as such, 1964’s A Fistful of Dollars. The film was only Leone’s second as director and starred Clint Eastwood as The Man with No Name in his first major acting role.
The beginning of Leone’s Dollars trilogy may mark the birth of the spaghetti western as a self-conscious subgenre. But even before the earlier parody westerns made in Italy, other Italian filmmakers had been making movies in the genre.
The very first of these filmmakers, ironically, was Sergio Leone’s father Vincenzo Leone. He directed the first ever western film directed by an Italian, La vampira Indiana (“The Indian Vampire”), way back in 1913. Amazingly, the title role was played by Sergio Leone’s mother Bice Valerian.
With this family history, it seems like the younger Leone was destined to make spaghetti Westerns decades before the term existed. Like father, like son.
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